Helmut Marko has lived up to his reputation. After just six months in the Red Bull garage, Pierre Gasly is moving back to Toro Rosso after a series of underperforming results compared to teammate Max Verstappen. Marko is the least sympathetic and doesn't hide his opinion.
"Gasly has had too many problems in traffic and that caused him to lose places. In addition, he also doesn't like to catch up, so you just lose points. We had to respond and give Albon the chance until the end of the year. We'll see who will be driving next to Max Verstappen next year," Marko explains to Auto Bild.
Red Bull is just 44 points from Ferrari in the Formula 1 world championship, whereas Gasly is a distance 118 points behind former teammate Verstappen. Without a doubt, Red Bull should at least be within touching distance of Ferrari and seems to be playing on Marko's mind.
Many people, including Horner, expected the full season to be a transition year with the new Honda engine. But that turned out to be a transitional five races and now the Austrian team are competing at the top consistently. Not only engine upgrades, but aerodynamic changes have been made to the RB15 across the season. Marko admits they didn't expect the Honda engine to be so strong.
"We built a car with too little downforce because we hadn't estimated the engine so well. They provide much more power, which means that we could have used much more downforce. Now we tried to compensate for the lack of speed with less downforce, but that turned out to be unnecessary. The last few races have shown that we know how to take the right steps," the Austrian concludes.